I've been reporting in East Africa on the impact of President Trump's USAID cuts, and I find that not only are children dying in large numbers but the pace is accelerating as stockpiles run out and people grow weaker. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/o...

It's a shame no one has made an epic rap battle video between Pasteur and Koch yet

I don't find any of the content on r/MapPorn erotic.

Dakota Gruener and I have a new piece out in the new issue of @worksinprogress.bsky.social : worksinprogress.co/issue/sunscr...

Fun article about “outsider” scientists and their breakthroughs. “Academia filters most funding, publishing, and hiring decisions through senior insiders, which favors ideas within existing paradigms.” worksinprogress.co/issue/why-sc...

Your regular reminder that measles vaccines are the most lifesaving childhood vaccine in the schedule, and save over a million lives globally per year. ourworldindata.org/measles-vacc...

In the 1970s, it took 8,000 pounds of pancreas glands from 23,500 animals just to make a single pound of insulin.

It’s not funny!!! Continental crust only behaves this way when it’s very distressed 😣

I got this wonderful relief map of the world and my first reaction was “holy bleep the Tibetan plateau”

Important life update: I learnt how to make an elevation map! In other news, I had no idea the Tibetan plateau was so massive.

Great piece by Alex Telford. Antibody treatment is over a century old, when von Behring and Kitasato made an early 'vaccine' against diphtheria. But back then, they came from injecting animals with toxins. Today they're produced by cells in steel tanks and treat millions. How did we get here?

New issue of Works in Progress!! • A blueprint for far-UVC to disinfect the air • How antibody manufacturing scaled up • Magical systems thinking • Hydropower, dams and water conflict • How France built nuclear • Science needs outsiders • Sunscreen for the planet Read it here: worksinprogress.co

I'm afraid we've been at it again

Works in Progress is now available as a print magazine. I think it's the most beautiful and readable magazine I've ever seen. Subscribe today for $100/£75 to receive six beautiful, 120-page issues a year. worksinprogress.co/print

episode should have been called 'The Green Revolution in Insulin' (harvesting insulin from genetically modified bacteria)

The reviews are in! "I heard it just now! So good 😊" – my mom "Just listened to the new insulin episode and loved it." – @rossaokod.bsky.social "you should have added 5 more minutes on how early researchers checked for the sweetness of animal urine..." – @pseudoerasmus.bsky.social

I just signed up for the print version of Works in Progress. I wasn't familiar with the online publication so I visited the site to read some existing stories. I'm very happy with what I saw.

Works in Progress is now available in print! Subscribe here: worksinprogress.co/print

Five years after we started it, I'm super happy to share that Works in Progress is now available as a print magazine! 🥹 It'll have everything on web and more. You can subscribe today for $100/£75 to receive 6 beautiful, 120-page issues of our magazine a year. worksinprogress.co/print

How is that not sci-fi

I knew that there has been incredible progress for diabetics, but I hadn’t been quite aware of the central role that insulin played in kicking off biotechnology as a field ✨

NEWS: By vaccinating babies at birth, the U.S. nearly eradicated hepatitis-B in children. Kennedy's vaccine advisory panel is expected this week to recommend delaying the shot, opening a window for kids to be infected. Exclusive by @jackie-fortier.bsky.social kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

New podcast episode of HARD DRUGS! A hundred years ago, insulin was scraped from pig pancreases. Today, it’s made by bacteria in giant tanks. In this episode, we cover 100 years of insulin … in 15 minutes!

Last episode: an introduction to what proteins are This episode: proteins can be medicines! Insulin is a protein. 104 years ago, no one with diabetes had been injected with it, then came insulin from animals, then came bioreactors...

New podcast episode of HARD DRUGS! A hundred years ago, insulin was scraped from pig pancreases. Today, it’s made by bacteria in giant tanks. In this episode, we cover 100 years of insulin … in 15 minutes!

New post! A round up of the latest advances in biotech and medicine by @nikomccarty.bsky.social and me. Prime editing, curing whipworm, a new narcolepsy drug, designing protein nanoparticles, the 3D structure of E. coli's genome and more! Read it all here: www.worksinprogress.news/p/whats-new-...

This graphic shows about two-thirds of all antibiotic drug classes were developed during the "Golden Age of Antibiotics" from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s. Since 1970, just 8 new classes of antibiotics have been approved. ourworldindata.org/golden-age-a... (by @scientificdiscovery.dev)

Many retellings of smallpox make it sound like Jenner deliberately infected a young boy with full-blown smallpox to test his vaccine. But that wasn't what happened. He tested whether the boy would have a reaction to *variolation*, which was already standard practice to protect children back then.

Reading this article made me feel like I was in the news environment of the early 2010s www.scmp.com/news/people-...

ICYM: International bodies for which the US Administration has apparently stopped paying assessed dues include (thread):

Unpopular opinion, but I appreciate how sycophantic GPT is to me. “Verdict: This is an excellent passage. You demonstrate a deep grasp of the science and history — and importantly, communicate it in a way that’s engaging, precise, and accessible.“ So true. Thank you. 🙇‍♀️

I saw this and unfortunately immediately thought, 'The sun farted?'

TIL the father of Joseph Lister (famous pioneer of antiseptic surgical techniques), J. J. Lister, developed far superior microscope lenses than were available at the time in his spare time while he was a wine merchant, and essentially kickstarted modern histology, along with Thomas Hodgkin.

TIL that Koch produced the precursor of the Petri dish - the first solid culture medium technique - and Julius Petri was then his assistant.

I'm writing what has turned into a monster of an article and I can't figure out how to control its length 😣

The international tram driving championships are live on YouTube right now! www.youtube.com/embed/smp0vo... One of the events is "tram curling" where the tram gives a little cart a shove and tries to get it to stop at the right point

Blog: US Funding of International Organizations Has Collapsed With weeks left in FY, US has paid zero toward assessed (membership) contributions to WHO, WTO, FAO, ILO, UNESCO, NATO, OECD, WMO, WIPO & more. FY26 budget suggests paying dues to only 7 out of 46 organizations under the IO account.

Cool job, decent salary. Have a look if you're a publications designer 👇👇

Designers! We're looking to hire a graphic designer and typesetter based in London to oversee and do the production of our upcoming print edition at Works in Progress magazine. If you like this work below, you might be the person for us! More detail: www.worksinprogress.news/p/were-hirin...

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

My schoolteachers never told me that there was politics in everything. This feels like the time I found out about Harry Houdini's lobbying against fortune-telling! blogs.loc.gov/headlinesand...

George Bernard Shaw's (!) description of opsonization in 1906: "[...] phagocytes, which attack and devour disease germs for us, do their work only when we butter the disease germs appetizingly for them with a natural sauce [...]" – from his play The Doctor's Dilemma.

I didn't realise how nationalistic different theories of immunology became in the 19th century, or that Pasteur and Koch hated each other.

New paper out with @boryslaw.bsky.social 🥳 In which we sketch out how to rethink measurement invariance causally for applied researchers. And provide a causal definition of measurement invariance! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I guess this has probably already gone viral somewhere but I am simply dying at this picture of a bear that looks like it hired a photographer to do a glamour shoot

Looking through a photo album on my phone that has some inexplicable images

My first job was transcribing doctors notes so enjoyed trying to decode this. "It's reassuring isn't it, to have lasted so long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and _, and still to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends"

Robert Hooke's drawings of objects under the microscope were so beautiful. These are from "Micrographia" in 1665

Thread of some USAID projects (still) cancelled that were providing lifesaving support, from the Project Resource Optimization list. They could still be restarted, they could still save lives...

Always fascinating to read about replication before the 20th century. Here it's Pasteur doing a live demonstration of the efficacy of his animal anthrax vaccine (the third vaccine ever developed).